Claire Gillian

Image by enchiladaplate via Flickr

The good news is I received a check in the mail today for…wait for it…$12.75! This is the fee I earned for selling a 5100 word short story for $0.0025 per word. Yes, that’s two zeroes immediately following the decimal point, as in 1/4 of one penny per painstakingly selected word. I am officially a (meagerly) PAID author AND since my piece exceeded 5000 words, I’ll receive a free print copy of the anthology that contains my work. Woo-hoo. No, that should be WOO-HOO!! and I mean that without any trace of sarcasm.

The bad news is two-pronged as well. First, I’ve spent $10 (with no forthcoming royalty rights) downloading an e-copy for myself and one as a slightly belated birthday gift for my father.

Second, I’m not as proud of my work as I should be, as I want to be. I read it last night on the heels of one of the other stories by an author I “know”. It’s like sewing the most beautiful dress you can imagine to the best of your abilities and proudly showing up at prom only to realize it looks painfully homemade next to the sequined gowns of the other ladies. 😦 Dotted swiss with rick rack trim seemed like a good idea at the time.

On the other hand, I don’t know too many folks who would have the nerve (or cluelessness) to submit a comedic story for a horror/erotica anthology. I’ll give myself a few chutzpah points for that to tip the scale to the positive side. After all, my silly nature did net me a Silverback and a couple of smart aleck kids. Oh…wait…

I have a new secret weapon and it’s called Write or Die from writeordie.com. Well, it’s not so secret for many other people, of course, but for me it’s been a godsend because I am VERY easily distracted by the web. With Write or Die, I set this baby for a 30 minute increment, set a goal of anywhere from 300 to 500 words, depending on where I’m at, and GO! I have exceeded my goals every time. The screen starts to turn red if your hands are idle too long. I can’t have that so I write and write and write and before I know it, I’m at 500 words with 18 minutes left to go or the alarm goes off at 30 minutes and I’ve written 900 words. Heavens to murgatroid! I’m a writing goddess with this tool.

I got all my words in this week. Still no beta reading, though I managed a couple of small critiques. My critique debt is massive, however, and I feel guilty about it but I feel compelled to write more than edit or beta read right now so I’ll probably stick with this until I smell the smoke of burnout.

My cumulative stats are updated on my ROW80-2 page.

Linky for the other ROW80 participants is up and ready for you to share the encouragement with my peers. Thanks for the read!